En Garde! Brooklyn Tech grad makes lunge to Olympic fame

Anne Cebula is among the dozens of New Yorkers who are competing at this year’s Olympic Games.

However, unlike many of her fellow athletes, Cebula – who hails from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn – didn’t even start her sport until she was 15.

That’s when she joined a free after-school fencing club as a freshman at Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene. She went on to win two NCAA titles and became the first student-athlete to claim a title in any sport at Barnard College.

Now, a decade later, she’s competing in both team and individual epée in Paris. She’s also a model who has worked with brands including Kaight and Marc Jacobs.

Cebula caught up with WNYC host Janae Pierre to discuss her path to the Olympics and how she’s feeling in the run-up to the competition. Below is an edited version of their conversation.

Janae Pierre: Tell us about when you started competing and how you eventually came to join the U.S. Olympic team.

Anne Cebula: I first saw fencing while watching the 2008 Beijing Olympics on TV. And I guess just the way the universe works, I was watching a New York native, Keeth Smart.

He was fencing in the final leg of the men's saber team match for a silver medal against Russia. He gets the final point and it's like watching an opera – they're screaming and masks are being ripped off.

I was just absolutely enraptured by the whole thing. I thought it was the most beautiful sport I've ever seen. I told myself, “I want to do that and I want to do that there.”

So when it came time to choose a high school, one of my options was Brooklyn Tech and they had a free fencing club. And I took that club so seriously. In September, the coach was like, “Oh, there's this fencing club. Sign up if you'd like.”

I'd say about 70 kids showed up. And by the end, there was only about 10 – because he didn't open the equipment closet until May. It was just footwork, fitness, running up and down stairs. And then when he finally did pull out the equipment, he was like, “Listen, this is all I can really do for you. If you want to take this sport seriously, go do a summer camp for a couple days in any club in the city because New York City is a hotbed for fencing.” I didn't know that.

And so that's what I did. It's been a crazy journey ever since.

Talk a bit more about the fencing culture in Brooklyn as you were growing up. You just said that you didn't know that fencing was a hotbed here in New York City.

I would commute after school. Coming from Fort Greene, I'd go up to Chelsea because a lot of the clubs are in Manhattan. Now they're growing steadily and in fact, one of the main clubs I train at is in Brooklyn, Coney Island.

It just has such a longstanding history here, and because it is a major city, whenever people travel into the United States to train, it's either New York or L.A. or Houston, Texas – but usually the No. 1 pick is New York City.

So you have such a wide range of opponents because you never know who's going to pop in that day because they're traveling around.

Our listeners might be less familiar with fencing, than say, swimming or gymnastics. What's something that you want people to know about the sport?

It is so addictive. Once you understand the rules, it's so easy to root for certain players or just get super invested.

I didn't understand anything that was going on when I first watched it, but I was just In love with the aesthetics, the athleticism of it. I was like, “This is like ballet, but like swords!”

Once you love fencing, you love it for life and you really try to pass it on to others. It's a word-of-mouth sport for now.

And now that we're on the verge of competition getting underway, how are you feeling?

I'm actually feeling pretty calm. I was a little alarmed by that because I was like, “Why am I not more excited?” And I spoke to a sports psychologist here at the [Olympic] Village and he said it’s a very normal feeling.

Our qualification process for our sport is a year long. Other sports have one or two or three Olympic trial events, like back-to-back. Ours starts in the year and it's just whoever is ranked at the end of the year and it's a really stressful year. You're kind of always on edge. So it's very normal not to suddenly be super excited all the time because you've gone through all that.

And also, at the end of the day, it's another competition. It's not just a big party.

Do you have any advice for other athletes who are hoping to make it to the Olympics someday?

Build a support system. Build a team. That is so, so, so, so important. I'm proud of myself 10 years ago that I scrambled around and didn't take no for an answer. It has made the biggest difference, especially in the past two to three years — we had the triad because of COVID. Like that has made the difference between me making the team or not.